NCAA, NBA basketball teams use tech to improve their games

Updated on: March 25, 2016 / 2:02 PM
/ CBS News

Basketball is getting a lot more high-tech. College teams -- including some in the NCAA tournament -- and pros like the Golden State Warriors are harnessing the power of technology to help improve their game.

"The Warriors love to apply anything they can to get ahead," Golden State Warriors guard Klay Thompson told CNET's Brian Tong. "We've got a device that tracks our movement and how much energy you were expending."

Right now, every NBA venue is installed with a camera system called SportVU that gathers player and game data in real time.

"It's six cameras spread around catwalks and we track the movements of the players 25 times a second," Charles Rohlf, product manager for tracking and data analytics at Stats, told CBS News.

Rohlf said that the data collected by the system is sent to a server that generates a host of statistics on everything from passes, dribbles and touches, to basketball plays like drives and isolations. The system can also record how fast a player is running, how far the player went, and how much physical load has been on his body.

For those who aren't pros, a consumer version of this type of technology will soon be available for your neighborhood court.

Spaulding and ShotTracker will release a team-tracking system that will include a "smart basketball," wearable sensors on players, as well as sensors placed around the court to track the game's action.

"It's multiplayer, multi-ball," Davyeon Ross, COO and co-founder of ShotTracker, said of the new system. "Really built to track data in a real-time environment."

For now, basketball tech for the consumer market is focused on helping individual players with shooting and dribbling. ShotTracker's individual system uses sensors that go on both the net and your shooting arm. Its app runs players through drills and calculates their shooting percentage.

In this connected age, "smart" basketballs can track your play. For instance, the WilsonX has sensors that measure when you make a shot, the distance from which you take that shot, and also measures misses. Looking to beef up your own highlight reel? The Blast Basketball Replay is a motion sensor that connects to a mobile app. It can record slo-mo videos with three different stats that you can review and share.